Eideard

There’s a lot that will be gleaned over the coming weeks and months from Japan’s nuclear “disaster.” It’s a pretty big nuclear fail, on par with Three Mile Island… It’s been at the front and center of global media and policy debates this weekend, and it’s an ongoing situation.

The latest is that Japanese authorities have reportedly said there’s a significant chance the fuel rods have partially melted at two of the reactors, and they are still fighting a full-blown meltdown. The operator of the reactors…resorted to pumping seawater into the reactors, which to many in the industry sounds very much like a last-ditch, worrisome effort. Reuters reported 140,000 people have been evacuated from the area as a safety precaution, and iodine is being readied to distributed to people in the area to protect them from radioactive exposure. We’ll soon see if the disaster will get worse or better.

What we do know is that the incident could have far-reaching repercussions on the nuclear policies of the governments of the U.S., European countries, China and India, and will likely do significant damage to public opinion in general of nuclear energy. As the Guardian put it succinctly: “When experts decide it is necessary to flood reactors in the world’s most technologically advanced nation with an improvised flow of marine muck, people will ask whether the industry’s contingency planning for disaster is really as good as we are always being promised.”

Already, anti-nuclear groups are already using the incident to point to the dangers — or at least unknowns — of nuclear…and beyond the public relations nightmare of the dangers associated with nuclear, costs are as much of a concern. Not just to build the plants, but also to deal with any nuclear problems. According to the World Nuclear Association, the cleanup of the damaged nuclear reactor system at Three Mile Island took nearly 12 years and cost approximately $973 million.

Katie Fehrenbacher’s cost concerns are legitimate and should be central to any revision and upgrading of planned nuclear power facilities. Though the old policies with rule of thumb of planning for an 80% chance of disaster already are passé in most nations. Now, here’s what we’re witnessing:

That’s just about a perfect analogy to what we’re about to witness over consideration of nuclear generation of electricity – because of what happened at a power plant designed in the 1960′s, built in the 1970′s that just suffered through an earthquake and tsunami beyond the specification for its construction.

Geologists drilling an exploratory geothermal well in 2009 in the Krafla volcano in Iceland encountered a problem they were simply unprepared for: magma (molten rock or lava underground) which flowed unexpectedly into the well at 2.1 kilometers depth, forcing the researchers to terminate the drilling…

Currently, a third of the electric power and 95 percent of home heating in Iceland is produced from steam and hot water that occurs naturally in volcanic rocks.

“The economics of generating electric power from such geothermal steam improves the higher its temperature and pressure,” Wilfred Elders explained. “As you drill deeper into a hot zone the temperature and pressure rise, so it should be possible to reach an environment where a denser fluid with very high heat content, but also with unusually low viscosity occurs, so-called ‘supercritical water.’ Although such supercritical water is used in large coal-fired electric power plants, no one had tried to use supercritical water that should occur naturally in the deeper zones of geothermal areas…”

Elders and his team studied the well within the Krafla caldera as part of the Iceland Deep Drilling Project, an industry-government consortium, to test whether geothermal fluids at supercritical pressures and temperatures could be exploited as sources of power…

“When the well was tested, high pressure dry steam flowed to the surface with a temperature of 400 Celsius or 750 Fahrenheit, coming from a depth shallower than the magma,” Elders said. “We estimated that this steam could generate 25 megawatts of electricity if passed through a suitable turbine, which is enough electricity to power 25,000 to 30,000 homes. What makes this well an attractive source of energy is that typical high-temperature geothermal wells produce only 5 to 8 megawatts of electricity from 300 Celsius or 570 Fahrenheit wet steam.”

Elders believes it should be possible to find reasonably shallow bodies of magma, elsewhere in Iceland and the world, wherever young volcanic rocks occur.

Hmmm. A significant portion of the Rio Grande Valley is a volcanic rift. The youngest areas of volcanic activity are less than 6,000 years old.

Maybe they could slip a wee bit of their ever-increasing budget into something with this kind of environmental potential, eh?

FedEx could learn today [Friday] what happened to a package containing radioactive materials that went missing a day before.

The company said it is searching in the Tennessee area and that the item is safe as long as nobody tampers with the protective packaging around it.

The item is a cylinder containing rods used for hospital machinery that were being sent to a person in Knoxville, Tennessee, said Sandra Munoz, a company spokeswoman. “The rods are used for quality control calibration,” Munoz said. “We have lots of experience in handling this kind of shipment.”

Munoz said the company may learn more Friday morning when two employees who handled the shipment return to work.

Uh, no one swiped the bar code in transit?

My experience, memory of screw-ups like this – unfortunately – usually ends in tragedy. Often, someone walked off with the radioactive marker source, putting themselves and their families at serious risk.

Phew! They found it. It had been double-boxed and the outer box with shipping info went to the destination. The inner box containing the radioactive rod inside a protective tube – was left aside because of no shipping info – in a FedEx terminal in Knoxville, Tennessee.

I’ve been blogging about this Salmonella outbreak for weeks. And it started a few weeks before the notoriety. The only thing new to report is that it may be something else!

“Produce investigations are very difficult, because a lot of times, vegetables are eaten all together,” said Dr. Patricia Griffin, at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta, Georgia. That makes it hard to trace back any one item to a source of contamination, she added. “We continue to keep an open mind about the possible source of this outbreak, as does FDA.”

Dr. David Acheson, associate commissioner for foods at the Food and Drug Administration, agreed. “There is a strong epidemiological association with tomatoes,” but the agency is also “looking into other ingredients,” he said.

Acheson said FDA officials and tomato growers were involved in “a two-way dialogue.”

But, there’s obviously little useful record-keeping.

The CDC says the outbreak, which is linked to a rare form of bacteria called Salmonella Saintpaul, has spread to include 810 cases in 36 states and the District of Columbia. And there is no sign that it’s abating. “We are still getting reports of recent illnesses,” Griffin said.

The true incidence is probably much higher, because the agency has estimated that about 30 cases occur for every one that is reported.

We’ve learned that distributors often mix tomatoes from different farms, different states, even different countries in the same retail packaging. Wonderful.

How about electing a government that requires our civil service to spend some time working on behalf of the citizens instead of fronting for corporate sleaze and greed?